Can Xi Jinping be the next Mao Zedong? Using the Big Five Model to Study Political Leadership

Abstract

It is commonly believed that the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, shares a leadership style with Mao Zedong on account of his charisma, prosecution of political enemies, and centralization of power. But is there any substantial evidence to supporting that belief? This paper seeks to answer the question by employing the Big Five model to investigate three dimensions related to leadership style—namely, charisma, political tolerance, and need for achievement. The psycholinguistic program LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) is used to analyze Mao and XI’s utterances in order to measure and compare their personal traits. Findings suggest that Mao and Xi share similar levels of ‘extraversion’ and ‘openness to experience’, but differ in ‘conscientiousness’, ‘agreeableness’, and ‘neuroticism’. Thus, while both Mao and Xi exude charisma, Mao manifests lower political tolerance whereas Xi has a greater need for achievement.

Extravert people use many verbs, adverbs, pronouns, social words, positive emotion words, but they use fewer tentative words, articles, words per sentence, negations, inclusive and exclusive words, and negative emotion words.

Multiple-authorship discovered the language cues, including Dewaele and Furnham [19], Pennebaker and King [66], and Mehl, Gosling and Pennebaker [60]. The formulas to measure the Big-five traits were devised in lights of the ‘F-measure’ of Heylighen and Dewaele [33]

*Explanation: Several studies show that an individual’s linguistic pattern reflects on his or her Big Five personality (see the above source). For instance, people who have high level of neuroticism tend to use frequently negative emotion words but less positive emotion words. These “markers” permit to identify and measure a person’s neuroticism when assessing his utterances. The formula to calculate the score of neuroticism is:

\( \mathrm{f}\left(\mathrm{N}\right)=\frac{\left(1 st\ pron+ neg. words\right)-\left( pos. words\right)+100}{2} \), where f(N) denotes the function of neuroticism. To calculate it, subtract the sum of positive words from the sum of 1st pronoun words (i.e. “I” and “we”) and negative words, the score is then divided by two. To show the score in percent form, 100 is added in the upper class. In the current study, the calculation of Mao and Xi’s level of neuroticism is demonstrated in below (along with the scores of each marker presented in Appendix 3):

Mccrae, Robert R., and Antonio Terracciano. 2005. Universal features of personality traits from the observer's perspective: data from 50 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88 (3): 547–561.Google Scholar

Sullivan, Julie, and John Transue. 1999. The psychological underpinnings of democracy: a selective review of research on political tolerance, interpersonal trust, and social capital. Annual Review of Psychology 50: 625–650.Google Scholar

79.

Sullivan, John L., George E. Marcu, Feldman Stanley, and James Piereson. 1979. A reconceptualization of political tolerance: illusionary increases, 190s-1970s. American Political Science Review 73: 781–794.Google Scholar

80.

Sullivan, John L., James Piereson, and George E. Marcu. 1993. Political tolerance and american democracy. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar

Walker, Stephen G., and Mark Schafer. 2000. The political universe of lyndon johnson and his advisors: diagnostic and strategic propensities in their operational codes. Political Psychology 21 (3): 529–543.Google Scholar